Behind Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, which is the Union’s number six economic power? The answer is Poland. Of all the 27 Member States that emerged from the Soviet bloc, which is therefore the one that weighs the most by far? Answer: Poland. Which of the 27 EU Member States now intends to devote 4% of its GDP to strengthening its defence? Answer: Poland.
Of the two EU Member States that had broken with liberal democracy, which one has just returned to it in an unambiguous vote? Answer: again and always Poland, and it is these four reasons that today make it the indispensable nation for the European Union to assert itself on the international stage.
Without Poland, it would be difficult and far too time-consuming to convince the countries of Central Europe that we must equip ourselves with an autonomous European Defence. We must do this urgently because, between the chaos of the Mediterranean, Vladimir Putin’s imperial ambitions and the polarisation of the United States towards China, our security is threatened on three fronts. We must do this because only one of our countries, France, has a real army. We must do this because, and this is even more serious, it is not impossible that Donald Trump will return to the White House and immediately set about dismantling the Atlantic Alliance in order to reach a better agreement with the Russian president, at the expense of the Ukrainians and the whole of Europe.
Everything forces us to be able to defend ourselves on our own, but we have not yet managed to get out of an in-between situation. On the one hand, the Trump presidency and Russia’s aggression against Ukraine have broken the taboo on common defence, the principle of which is no longer rejected by any EU member state. On the other hand, many of the 27 feel that European solidarity could fail them at the moment when it would be necessary to stand together, and consequently continue to prefer to rely on American protection, however uncertain they see it becoming.
The problem is that Central Europe has not forgotten that neither the Czechs nor the Poles could count on France and Great Britain against Hitler. History weighs heavily in this debate, and the European Union will not be able to become a power capable of assuring even its own defence until Poland, and the whole of Central Europe with it, has settled the accounts of the past century and received very solid security guarantees from its most powerful partners.
This is why France is now getting down to relaunching the “Weimar Triangle”, the Polish-German-French trialogue created after the fall of the Berlin Wall but which has been dormant for too long. With the Batory Foundation, I organised an afternoon of debates on this subject at the European Parliament last Wednesday. France’s new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stéphane Séjourné, has just visited Berlin and then Warsaw, after devoting his first foreign trip to Ukraine.
Other initiatives will follow, because not only do we have to lay the foundations for a pan-European defence industry, but we also have to invent the Union of tomorrow, a Union with multiple formats in which some thirty-five countries will have to coexist, with necessarily different degrees of integration. Here again, nothing can be done without Poland, the Union’s leading middle power, being at the forefront.
